Unreal Engine 5.1 is now available! Built upon the groundbreaking features introduced in UE5, the latest version is more robust, efficient, and versatile for all creators.
Lumen, Nanite, and Virtual Shadow Maps updates
The Lumen dynamic global illumination and reflections system, Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry system, and Virtual Shadow Maps (VSM) now support games and experiences running at 60 fps on next-gen consoles and capable PCs.
Nanite has also been updated with a Programmable Rasterizer to allow for material-driven animations and deformations via World Position Offset, as well as opacity masks.
Work smarter
With Virtual Assets, we’ve decoupled the metadata from the object data, enabling developers to sync only what they need from source control systems.
We’ve implemented automated Pipeline State Object (PSO) caching for DX12, simplifying the process needed to prepare a game for shipping in DX12.
All developers and creators will benefit from on-demand shader compilation—where only the shaders needed to render what is seen on screen while working in the Unreal Editor, and optionally during platform development iteration—are compiled.
Build large worlds, faster
World Partition now supports Large World Coordinates, enabling you to create massive open worlds without loss of precision.
Enjoy accelerated source control workflows with World Partition, thanks to an improved user experience around managing, filtering, searching, and viewing files and changelists.
New HLOD (Hierarchical Level of Detail) support for water rendering and streaming means you can create large water bodies in open worlds with better performance and a smaller memory footprint.
Virtual production, broadcast, and live events updates
Unreal Engine 5.1 boasts a dedicated In-Camera VFX Editor, including an improved Light Card system.
Color Correction Windows (CCWs) enable adjustments to be applied exclusively to anything behind them, and the ability to apply color corrections per Actor.
A new Media Plate Actor enables you to simply drag and drop footage from the Content Browser, while you can now play back uncompressed EXRs both in engine and with nDisplay with the appropriate SSD RAID.
VCam has been overhauled with a new underlying system utilizing Epic’s Pixel Streaming technology for improved responsiveness and reliability, and an updated UI with a camera-focused design that will be more familiar to camera operators.
Animation, rigging, and modeling
Now in Beta, the Machine Learning (ML) Deformer enables you to create high-fidelity approximations of complex proprietary rigs—or any arbitrary deformation.
Control Rig continues to expand toward fully procedural rigging with many updates to the core framework, including a new Construction Event that enables you to generate rig hierarchies via a graph, and Custom User Events for creating and triggering rig events.
We’ve extended Sequencer—Unreal Engine’s multi-track nonlinear animation editor—by adding support for constraints, and by exposing additional functionality through Blueprint and Python scripting. The UI/UX has been refactored for increased stability and extensibility, and to improve animation authoring and editing workflows.
Enhancements to geometry tools include new functions for Geometry Scripting, UV Editor improvements to handle more complex assets, and additional mesh editing and creation tools.
Audio
MetaSounds updates include additional node types, together with support for various multichannel output formats, and the new ability to show feedback on real-time node connections.
We’ve also introduced Soundscape, a plugin for procedural ambient sound generation.
AI
A number of artificial intelligence (AI) tools introduced in UE 5.0 move out of Experimental status: Smart Objects and State Tree to Production-Ready, and MassEntity to Beta.
MassEntity received UX improvements, CPU performance gains, and memory usage optimizations.
Smart Objects have received general stability and workflow improvements that make it more convenient to set up Smart Object Definitions.
State Tree updates include improved Actor and Blueprint-centric workflows, increased flexibility and modularity, and memory optimizations.
Lyra Starter Game Updated
The Lyra Starter Game sample has been updated to 5.1 and also includes some Lyra-specific bug fixes and improvements.
The full list of changes can be found on the Upgrading Lyra Starter Game page, along with information to help upgrade projects from 5.0.
If you previously installed the sample in 5.0, the launcher may prompt you to update the sample before you can create a project based on the new version. To create a 5.1 version of Lyra, make sure to select the 5.1 version after clicking the Create Project button inside the launcher.
Known Issues
For a complete listing of known issues affecting Unreal Engine 5.1, please see the Unreal Engine Public Issue Tracker .
If you discover new issues with this release, please report them using the guidelines in the link: How to Report a Bug .
And we're just getting started!
Check out the complete details in the Unreal Engine documentation—and share your feedback below!
